The Gathering (13 page)

I HAVE TAKEN
to driving at night. It was my headrest ghost who first called me out of the house–I caught him in the corner of my eye and thought, for a moment, that he was gone. Then I saw that he was slumped forward against the dash, patient as a stricken pensioner, trying not to pee. I had folded the seat forward to get Emily’s bicycle into the back, and did not set it straight when we came home. Now the seat had suffered a small but dreadful emergency out on the public roadway. I check the time: it is 3.30 a.m. At 3.45 the seat is still stuck. By 4.00 a.m. it has given up all pretence of a struggle, and is helplessly face down. I take my bottle of white out of the fridge a good half-hour before dawn and, on an impulse, pick up the car keys. Then, with glass, bottle and corkscrew I go out to my headrest ghost, in the rain.

When I open the passenger door and pull the lever, the seat springs back, shocked and relieved. It stares for a moment, straight ahead. It is still game, my headrest ghost, like a thousand mechanical friends in a thousand cartoons. I sit in. The upholstery is cold. I pull the cork and pour myself a glass of wine, then I leave the bottle out on the tarmac and close the door. I relax into the seat and drink in its chilly embrace, quite happy; the whole encounter made private by the rain.

I do this a few times in the next week or so. I go out and drink in the car. Sometimes, it is not raining and it makes me feel quite breathless to walk out into the dark alone, there is something so bare about our little estate at night; the neighbours, each in their madness, asleep in a row. Nothing matters. The wheelchair child in number seven, and ‘You Can’t Park Here’ in number ten, and my high-maintenance husband in number four, each dreaming their ordinary dreams.

I put the key in the ignition, just for the company of the air-conditioning, and I turn the radio on low. The urge to drive is very strong, but the wineglass, when I try it, will not balance in the cup holder. Still–and I am officially mad now, I am a mad housewife–I ease the car away from the kerb and, drinking all the while, move around the estate in first gear. I want to fling the empty glass into somebody’s front garden, but of course I do not do this. I pull over and set it down on the road, opposite the bottle, and through this little glass gateway I drive–past the carved granite boulder at the mouth of our enclave, and into the city beyond.

I am in a state of almost perfect fear as I work towards the centre of town; looking over my shoulder to check the emptiness in the car behind me, entering streets I have never entered before, always tending towards the sea. I hang on to the steering wheel, and brake too hard for the lights. I clip the kerb of a central island, and when the jolt clears my head I find that we are already, the car and me, on our way north, along the curve of Dublin Bay. I take satisfaction from the Hill of Howth, feeling, as I run the flat road along to it, that I am travelling over sand, that the tide still wants the ground under my wheels. In a car park at the top of the hill, I stop, and sit, and wait to be killed.

It is all getting a bit hectic now. I don’t allow myself to leave the house for nights at a time, or I grab my stuff as soon as everything is still and I go. I do this maybe three or five times and wake out of a blank on the road behind the Sugarloaf, or running by a stud wall in Kildare. There is nothing illegal about driving, but it all feels forbidden to me, the housewife in her Saab, abandoning her children while they sleep, leaving them unprotected from their dreams.

Then, one night, I know the place I am avoiding and, with great and deliberate movements of the wheel, I overcome the car’s natural reluctance and drive it all the way to Broadstone.

The streets are tiny. These are toy houses, children’s houses. We could not have lived here. Where did we fit? Before I know it I am out on Constitution Hill facing a low wall with a grey Virgin Mary standing on the grey, round world, but it is not the fortress I remember, with the buses in rows at the top. The bus station is further down the hill, though it is on a height, and as I sink towards the river I see, on my left, the church where we were caught robbing candles. It is a Capuchin Friary, says the board outside, and I feel that the horrible priest could not have come from there, because these are friars, lovely people with bare feet in sandals in the middle of winter. But then, why not? It might have happened in a friary all the same.

I drive back up to Broadstone and find myself, too quickly, at the small gate into the Basin where I park and get out of the car. There it is! This is the place where Liam peed–not, as I see now, through wire mesh, but through old-fashioned railings, though the rest of it is the same. It is all the same. The water is the same. And the path. This is where it happened.

I get back in the car and drive with no lights straight to Ada’s house. I park in the first vacant spot, and I sit there for fifteen, twenty minutes, doing lots of urgent, awful remembering, before I realise that I am on the wrong street, though the number on the door is the same.

Tom meets me at the door. His nose flares at the fresh air on my coat and then he turns away.

I say, ‘Where are the girls?’

He says, ‘Where were you?’

I start to laugh. ‘Ha ha,’ I chuckle as I put my bag down on the counter, as I take off my coat, as I hang my coat under the stairs. He has dropped the girls to school and doubled back to confront me. From the bunched-up look of him I think he might give me a thump.

‘Are you missing work, for this?’ I say.

‘Where were you?’ he says, and I’d love to say I was out, like he is out all the time. Doing, making, being–or even shagging. I’d love to say, ‘I was just out shagging,’ in a debonair sort of voice, but I don’t want to think about how wan my body has become since I have taken to the darkness. I put my hand gently against his shirt front and the gesture is so graceful, even as I watch it, that it leads me, quite easily, to the buckle of the belt, which I tug with my other hand, and so, by softly pushing him away while pulling him forward, I contrive to blow my husband, in our own kitchen. On a school day.

This is real
, I think.
This is real.

Though I am not sure that it is, actually. When we are done, Tom plants a dry, thoughtful kiss in the middle of my forehead. He can not claim that he has been fobbed off–not after his official, all-time favourite thing–but he knows that he has been fobbed off, all the same. And it makes him angry.

‘I just don’t know where you’re coming from,’ he says. A corporate phrase from my corporate boy.

When he is gone, I go upstairs and lie down on Emily’s bed. Then I get up and pull the duvet back and lie down again. I do not know what she smells like, she is like a perfume you have been wearing too long, she is still too close to the inside of me. So I can not smell her, quite, but I know that her smell is there as I lie down with the thought of her beside me. I want to run my hand down her exquisite back, and over her lovely little bum. I want to check that it is all still there, and nicely packed, and happy, that my daughter’s muscles agree with her bones. I want to find the person that I built from my body’s own stuff, and grew on ten thousand plates of organic sausages and sugar-free beans, and I want to squeeze every part of her tight, until she is moulded and compact. I want to finish the job of making her, because when she is fully made she will be strong.

I TAKE THE
train back from Brighton, and I meet Kitty in a pub in the ‘Gatwick Village’, for the flight home. The place is unnerving, all the usual slop of pint glasses and ashtrays, but on miniature tables to allow room for the trolleys and backpacks and bags; men falling asleep over their beers, unshaven and sad. The pub itself just a pretence of a pub, a painted corner of the concourse, a differently coloured floor. There are no doors. I pick my way through the filth of baggage and delayed lives to find Kitty–a woman weirdly like my little sister, though much too old.

When I reach the table, I look down at the empty glasses in front of her and I ask, ‘Are they all yours?’

‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ she says.

‘Just asking.’

‘Two of them are mine, the rest aren’t mine. OK?’

‘Do you want another one?’

‘Yes thank you, I would love another one.’

I turn to wade back towards the bar, and hear her say, ‘Bunny,’ which is the name she had for me when she was a child. I turn back to embrace her, my back twisted, my torso held away, as she half-rises to receive the hug, her thighs trapped under the little table of wood. Her hair feels fake, like a wig, but I think it is just crisping up under the dye and Frizz-Ease. From a distance, it was just as curly and beautiful and black as it ever was, though when I check her face I see that it has collapsed, quite fundamentally, and all the distraction of blue eyes, and mischievous cheeks, and winning smile–the whole Celtic chipmunk–has melted as easy as wax, leaving the flesh hanging on to bones, bones, bones.

‘How are you?’ I say.

‘
How
am I?’

‘Yes. How are you?’

‘Fine. I’m fine.’

‘What is it, anyway?’ I say.

‘It’s a G and T, thanks.’

‘Yes, I thought it was.’

‘Yes.’

It is many years, I think, since I have ordered a drink at a bar. The barman ignores me for the longest time. I feel like shouting at him that I am quite grown up and want to give him some money now. I want to say, ‘My brother is dead! Serve me immediately!’ but then, so what? Some people haven’t seen their brothers in twenty years.

I get Kitty’s gin and one for myself.

‘English measures,’ she says, holding the glass up and waggling it, like I am such a fool.

Kitty always goes on about being hit as a child, though the fact is that she was a complete brat: she always came back for more, and she often got it; not just from me and Liam, who actually liked her, but also from Mossie-the-psychotic, who taunted and enraged her into a total Shirley Temple. There was something transcendental about her rage at six or seven, her body rigid and her temper whizzing around the room, until she caught it, somehow, and stuffed it back into herself. After which, she exploded into a fire-breathing fluff-pot, a cartoon little sister; fists yammering against Mossie’s chest. Which was just asking for trouble, because you shouldn’t take things too far with Mossie. At least with myself and Liam, we only did it to tease.

And of course I feel guilty, when I think of it now, and I don’t believe in hitting anybody, at all, ever, but I still find a twitch of something more than amusement when she is being a prissy little bitch like this. The toss of the head, some small superiority, it makes me wish she was six all over again.

I lift my glass to her, ever so slightly, and say, ‘Cheers.’

She starts to cry as soon as we are on the plane; she weeps the whole way home. Pints of it. She moves from quiet leakage to sighs, heaves and judders, and then back again. It sounds to me like she is practising crying as much as actually doing it. I look out the window, while the air hostess kindly offers a brandy in her coffee and then charges five pounds sterling for it.

‘Are you all right? Are you sure now?’

The man on the other side of her knows that someone has died. He wonders am I a social worker, or perhaps even a prison officer, and why am I not holding her hand. And I too wonder why I am not holding her hand, as I look down on the distant skin of the Irish sea. ‘We slept in the same room for twenty years,’ I want to tell him. ‘Isn’t that enough for you, isn’t it already
above and beyond
?’

Liam, meanwhile, is sitting one row up across the aisle. There is a slumbrous menace about his ghost that makes me realise how indifferent he was when he finally walked away from us all into the sea. I can feel his gaze on the skin of my cheek as he turns to look at me, uncanny and dead. I know what it is saying.

The truth. The dead want nothing else. It is the only thing that they require.

I look up too quickly, and he is gone.

There is a big white house on Lambay Island–Georgian, at a guess, and worth gazillions. I saw it first, it must have been, from the beach, the day we went with Ada to visit our mad Uncle Brendan. And it suddenly kicks into me, this fact of Ada’s son lost to Largactyl and squalor. How many years of it? He probably died wondering who he actually was.

I search up the coastline for a beach, a bridge, an estuary, back again to a headland–and there it is: a pencil of a round tower, a fat vase of a water tower and, beside that again, a group of buildings surrounded by trees. I have just caught sight of it when I have lost it again, the plane banks and grabs a view of sky.

‘What happened to Uncle Brendan?’ I shout at Kitty, over the noise.

‘What happened to Uncle Brendan?’

‘Yes, Uncle Brendan.’

‘What do you want to know about Uncle Brendan for?’

The plane opens its underbelly and we wait for the wheels to lock. Getting its little leggies straight, digging down its heels.

‘He died,’ says Kitty, relenting.

‘Did he?’

‘I quite liked him.’

‘Did you?’

I was sure I had never met him, though now here he is, suddenly at the Christmas table in Griffith Way, a face made fantastic by falling jowls, his nostrils rimmed red and his eyes–his eyes when I think of them were tired and unpleasant, as though madness was a tedious business; nearly as tedious as Christmas. My memory puts him in an orange paper hat, with a glass of brandy in his shaking hand, but there was no alcohol in our house until Liam started smuggling it in, and there were no paper hats either.

Brendan is where we got our eyes from: Spillane eyes that met my father’s Atlantic blue to give us our undiluted, alcoholic’s eyes, of straight-no-chaser blue; beautiful and pathological and somehow absent, or absent-minded, until we ‘turn them on’, which is to say we notice someone and decide to give them the full blue.

(My own eyes are like Ada’s, a sort of nothing grey they call ‘
liath
’ in Irish when they write about stone walls or the sea. Alice got these rainy eyes too, as did Ivor and Midge. We were not true, electric Hegartys, but a sort of subspecies; the Firbolg of Griffith Way.)

Uncle Brendan is also where we got our mathematical streak–this, in fact, a fairly prosaic facility to do with remembering phone numbers and reprimanding girls at supermarket tills for overcharging on the mixed leaves. None of us have what Uncle Brendan had–this much we knew–because Uncle Brendan had Maths. We were always given to understand that our mother’s brother was too good for this world.

And though Ernest reads up his String Theory by candlelight in the mountains of Peru, most of the clever Hegartys are just that–
clever
, which is to say unredeemed; earning more or less money than the next person and liable to smart remarks. I realise, as we land, that life in St Ita’s was not a romantic one, but more likely a long, dirty business of watching the piss gather in your lap, and nearly knowing what you were thinking, from time to time.

‘I know what I’m thinking!’ says the mad man in my mind, banging the wooden arm of his armchair. ‘I know what I’m thinking!’ and the passing nurse says, ‘Good for you!’

The airport terminal starts to slide past the window and it looks so much like a picture of a building, the whole ritual of landing feels so cinematic and fake, that I don’t believe any of it for a while. Uncle Brendan is not dead now, or not properly dead, and there is something so skittish about the moving walkway, the escalators and the baggage carousels, something that will not adhere yet to Irish soil, that when I finally get the Saab out of the car park and hit the roundabout I turn north instead of south on the airport road.

It is only a few miles away, this place. The little bridge is still there, and the railway line, slicing north. After which, there is a sudden slack in my mental map and the road unravels in front of me. I am just beginning to lose hope when it snaps back into the road that I remember–just the same, long and straight. There is a concrete path along the left-hand side, a line of disastrous trees along the right, beyond them a ditch that gives way to a low-lying field, where a vivid, wet green inclines, here and there, into a pool of water over grass.

Beyond the trees is the raw white light of the sky over water.

This is it. There is no shift between my mind’s eye and my real eye. I try to slow down to the pace of my memory, but it is slipping by me too fast.

‘Do you remember this road?’ I say to Kitty.

‘What road?’

‘This road.’

‘What about it?’

Already she has eaten up half the past. Half my life is gone before she decides to understand.

‘Do I remember it?’ says Kitty.

‘Jesus,’ I say.

‘What?’

By now we are past the bungalow in its field of corn, though it is trimmed to stubble in the low autumn sun.

‘The man with two sticks?’

And here, where she might well bring things to a pitch, Kitty just says, ‘Oh.’

‘Walking along here?’

‘Here?’ says Kitty. ‘No, not here.’

At which moment I come to a halt, and make a right turn into the hospital drive.

It is as though we are driving through a sudden brief mist, on the other side of which is the past. I push along in second gear, leaning over the steering wheel as we pass a terrace of warden’s cottages, the master’s house perhaps, and then the hospital itself, which is built in Victorian red brick, and the size of a small town.

‘Handicap Services,’ says the sign and I think, with relief, that the lunatics have gone now. The lunatics have turned, quite naturally, to dust. People are not mad, any more. The lunatics are just a residue of skin in these rooms; scratched off, or hacked off, or maybe just shed: a million flakes of skin, a softness under the floorboards, a quality of light.

We pass a courtyard with a high chimney and a low boiler house, all in extravagant, industrial red brick. There are curious round windows on the boiler house, with the Star of David dividing the panes.

‘Jesus,’ says Kitty, thinking, as I am thinking for a second, that they are burning mental patients in there, just to keep the hospital radiators hot.

I pause at the handball alley, engine idling, and look at the round tower and the water tower beyond. But it is not possible to pull up the handbrake and get out into the naked air of the asylum, with the casement windows still watching in their rows. I inch towards a bungalow down by the sea, my fat tyres creeping over the gravel, then I do a three-point turn, and leave.

Once we are back out the gate, I scoot the few hundred yards to the sea itself, the public sea, the swimming sea. Salt water always makes me feel so sane; the height of the waves, and the flick of fish, and the huge press of it on the ocean floor all notwithstanding. There is a little housing estate coming down to the shore, a child on a bicycle, blank with curiosity, and, after I turn at the road’s end, a grey wall enclosing a small field. And in that field–it is quite small–is a Celtic cross that says:

I get out of the car to look at it.

1922–1989

IN YOUR CHARITY
,

PLEASE PRAY

FOR THE RESIDENTS OF

ST ITA’S HOSPITAL

BURIED IN THIS CEMETERY

MAY THEY REST IN PEACE

Just one cross–quite new–at the end of a little central path. A double row of saplings promise rowan trees to come. There are no markers, no separate graves. I wonder how many people were slung into the dirt of this field and realise, too late, that the place is boiling with corpses, the ground is knit out of their tangled bones.

I look back, helpless, at Kitty in the front seat of the car.

They have me by the thighs. I am gripped at the thighs by whatever feeling this is. A vague wind. It clutches at me, skitters between my clothes and my skin. It lifts every hair. It grazes my lip. And is gone.